Having oil or gas reserves, such as Canada's tar sands, often brings a questionable benefit to the producer nation's economy or society as a whole (Norway is one notable exception).

While much of the world seeks to avoid serious climate change, Harper and his tight-knit crew of ideologues and communications experts are instead lauding their Clean Energy Dialogue with the United States, which emphasises just how "clean" Canada's tar sands oil is.

Canada claims that reducing its greenhouse gas emissions without Washington onboard is impossible as their economies are so interlinked. This argument was adopted publicly after Barack Obama's election. Prior to this, Harper told parliament in 2007 it was widely accepted Canada could not reach its Kyoto target to cut emissions, and abandoned reducing any emissions at all. The country's emissions are some 25% above 1990 levels, nowhere close to its 2012 target of 6% below 1990 levels.

After Obama's election, one West Wing insider said turning to Canada's tar sands for oil was the equivalent to turning your Prius into a 16-wheeler. The US Environmental Protection Agency rates Alberta's tar sands as 14-17% more carbon intensive than so-called conventional crude from "well to wheel" – oil industry poetry for total CO2 emissions from production to combustion.

Since at least 2007, US climate policy from George Bush to Obama has sought to cap the energy content of fuel against its carbon content, making the tar sands a sore loser, and Brazilian-style sugar cane ethanol an absolute winner. So the real sell for Harper to the US is that tar sands emissions are no more carbon intensive than conventional crude.

Canada could have cut its emissions without the US. Instead, the public climate debate is how Canada's emissions comprise 2% of global emissions and the tar sands one-fifth of that, and that developing countries need to reduce their emissions as they will contribute the bulk of global emissions by 2050. But the reality behind Canada's public energy and climate policy is the challenge of how to sell the tar sands.

Recently, new federal environment minister and former broadcast journalist Peter Kent even stressed the tar sands are "clean" and more human-rights friendly than oil from the Middle East. This of course is a unique selling point when your main customer, the US, has insisted for 40 years on its need to be independent of foreign oil, particularly that from the Middle East. "Clean" or not, about 80% of tar sands CO2 goes into the air at the point of combustion – mainly in the US – giving the tar sands' contribution to climate change an intergenerational human rights dimension.

But Canada's ultimate problem reflects the dichotomy of industrial-capitalist society's relationship with the environment as a whole. The biosphere serves as the source of economic production and exchange and becomes its dumping ground. The environment is a utilitarian resource for people and the economy. The reality is that the economy should be seen as a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, where society helps the environment to flourish.

Canada's 34 million people have seen a land of plenty ever since fur-trapping gave rise to the Hudson Bay Company. Seal culling is still defended as essential for livelihoods and the environment, because 10 million seals diminish fish stocks. But cod fishing already collapsed off Canada's Atlantic provinces two decades ago from human overfishing.

Much of Quebec's rivers are barraged for hydro-electricity, causing mercury build-up. Asbestos mining continues. Forest areas the size of European countries are eaten away in British Columbia by rampant pine beetles whose larvae now survives lower overnight autumn temperatures because of climate change.

Significantly too, thawing permafrost renders futile newly navigable Arctic maritime passages when trains to and from the deepwater port of Churchill frequently travel little more than 10-15kph as the soil softens beneath its tracks.

Perhaps worst of all, as part of the federal government's highly utilitarian approach that frequently sacrifices the environment for the benefit of economy over society, water is an overlooked factor.

Canada's tar sands are massively water intensive. The bitumen is washed from the soil in oil sands mining, using water from the Athabasca River at the rate of 1bn litres per day for every 1m barrels per day (MBPD) oil production. And that's before a water intensive upgrade into synthetic crude. On average, one barrel of tar sands crude takes five barrels of water and the industry produces close to three MBPD, set to rise to five MBPD before 2020 as peak oil hits home and the oil price makes the tar sands ever more profitable.

The Peace River and Mackenzie River are also sources of tar sands surface water, the latter's basin possibly reduced by one-third since the early 1970s according to some sources.

And the US also has its eyes on Canada's relatively vast freshwater resources as it rapidly depletes its own aquifers.

But, as Harper seeks to sell tar sands crude and further contribute to anthropogenic climate change, Canadians should bear in mind as they count the cost of their carbon footprint that there are alternatives to fossil fuels but really no alternatives to fresh water.